Minette Walters - The Ice House

"Of what? The police? Prosecution?"

She smiled grimly, but didn't answer.

McLoughlin toyed with his teacup. "Someone tried to murder Miss Cattrell," he said. "Your daughter thought she heard her father. Could he have come back?"

She shook her head. "No, Sergeant, David would never come back." She looked him straight in the eye as she brushed a strand of red hair from her forehead. "He knows if he did, I'd kill him. I'm the one he's afraid of."

A very irritable Walsh sat in Anne's armchair and watched a policeman photographing prints on the outside of what was left of the French windows. It was a job that couldn't be put off till the morning in case it rained. The broken slivers of glass on the flagstones had been covered with weighted-down polythene. "There are going to be dozens of prints," he muttered to McLoughlin. "Apart from anything else, half the Hampshire police force have left their grubby paw marks round the shop." McLoughlin was examining the carpet by the French windows, looking for blood spots. He moved across to the desk. "Anything?" Walsh demanded.

"Nothing." His eyes were red-rimmed with exhaustion.

"So what happened here, Andy?" Walsh cast a speculative eye over his Sergeant, before glancing at his watch. "You say you found her at eleven forty or thereabouts. It is now one thirty and we have come up with some vague sounds in the distance and a woman with a fractured skull. What's your guess?"

McLoughlin shook his head. "I haven't got one, sir. I wouldn't even know where to start. We'd better pray she comes round soon and can tell us something."

Walsh levered himself out of the chair and shuffled over to the window. "Haven't you finished yet?" he demanded of the man outside.

"Just about, sir." He took a last photograph and lowered his camera.

"I'll leave someone here overnight and you can do the inside tomorrow." Walsh watched while the man packed up his equipment and left, carefully skirting the broken glass, then he shuffled back to the chair, playing up his age. He took out his pipe and began the process of filling it, watching McLoughlin closely from beneath the angry jut of his brows. "All right, Sergeant," he snapped, "now you can tell me just what the hell you've been up to. I don't like the smell of this one little bit. If I find you've been getting your priorities mixed, by God you'll be for the high jump."

Exhaustion and jangling nerves combined in a prolonged yawn. "I was trying to steal a bit of a march, sir. I thought there might be promotion in it." Bold, bare-faced lies, he thought, nothing too concrete, not even a half-truth that Walsh could check up on. If Phoebe could get away with it, then so could he.

Walsh's frown deepened. "Go on."

"I came over the wall at the bottom to see what happened when she came back from the Station. I must have got here by about ten forty-five. The others had all gone to bed but Miss Cattrell was sitting in that chair you're sitting in. She finally switched off her downstairs light at about eleven fifteen. I hung around for another ten minutes then set off for the car. I hadn't gone far when I thought I heard voices, so I came back to investigate. Her window was slightly open. I shone my torch round inside and found her there." He jerked his head towards the middle of the room.

Walsh champed thoughtfully on the stem of the pipe. "It was lucky you did. Mrs. Maybury said you were giving her heart massage when she came in. You probably saved her life." He lit the pipe and studied the Sergeant through the smoke. "Is this the truth?"

McLoughlin gave another huge yawn. He couldn't control them. "It's the truth, sir," he said wearily. Why was he trying to protect himself? This morning he would have welcomed an excuse to go. Perhaps he just wanted to know the end of the story, or perhaps he wanted vengeance.

Walsh was deeply suspicious. "If I find there's something been going on between the two of you, you'll be up on a discipline charge so damned fast you'll wonder what happened. She's a suspect in a murder enquiry."

The dark face cracked into a grin. "Do me a favour, sir, she's been treating me like Vlad the Impaler since I called her a dyke." He yawned again. "But I appreciate the compliment. In view of the bashing it's taken in the past couple of weeks, it does my ego good that you think I can pull a reluctant bird after twenty-four hours. Kelly wouldn't agree with you," he finished bitterly.

Walsh grunted. "Was it you who hit her?"

McLoughlin didn't have to feign surprise. "Me? Why would I want to hit her?"

"To get even. You're in the mood for it."

He stared at Walsh for a moment, then shook his head. "That's not the way I'd choose," he said. "But if Jack Booth ever turns up with a hole in his head, that might be down to me."

The Inspector nodded. "So what was Miss Cattrell doing for the half hour you watched her?"

"She sat in that armchair, sir."

"And did what?"

"Nothing. I presume she was thinking."

"You say the Maybury woman made no bones about wanting to kill her husband. Would she kill her friend too?"

"Possibly. If she was angry enough. But what was her motive?"

"Revenge? Perhaps she thought Miss Cattrell had talked to us."

McLoughlin shook his head slowly. "I imagine she knows Miss Cattrell better than that."

"Mrs. Goode? The Phillipses? The children?"

"Same question, sir. What was the motive?"

Walsh stood up. "I suggest we start looking," he said acidly, "before we all end up on point-duty. A weapon would be helpful. I want this entire house turned upside down, Sergeant. You can lead the search till Nick Robinson gets here. He'll be my number two in this investigation." He looked at his watch. "You'll be concentrating on the Maybury file. Be in my office at ten tomorrow morning. There's a pattern to all of this and I want it found."

"With respect, sir, I believe I can make a more valuable contribution here."

"You'll do as you're told in future, Sergeant," the older man snapped angrily. "I'm not sure what your game is, but I don't like people who try to steal a march over me."

McLoughlin shrugged. "Then I urge you not to get too sold on a pattern, sir. Mrs. Maybury has told you what she thinks happened and, as I pointed out this morning, Mrs. Phillips describes this house as a fortress. Why?"

Walsh eyed him thoughtfully for a moment then walked to the door. "You're being conned by some very professional liars, lad. If you don't sharpen up, you're going to look very foolish indeed."

There was a new sense of urgency about police activities. They moved into top gear with alacrity, demonstrating all too clearly that there was another gear to move into. It was as if the attempted murder of a known woman was on a different scale from the murder of an anonymous male stiff in the garden. Anne would have found it disquieting, except that she was in a coma in Intensive Care and knew nothing about it. Walsh would have denied it vigorously, but his irascible temper flayed his men instead when, after a thorough search of the house and grounds, they failed to come up with anything.

In the press, Streech Grange was likened, quite inappropriately, to 10 Rillington Place, as a setting for mass murder and decomposing remains. To Anne's friends, the burden of their association with it was heavy. In retrospect, their previous interrogations had the relaxed air of a social gathering. After the assault on Anne, the gloves came off and they were grilled dry. Walsh was looking for a pattern. Logic told him there was one. The odds against three unconnected mysteries in one house were so incalculable as to be beyond consideration.

For the children, it was a new experience altogether. As yet none of them had been questioned and it came like a baptism of fire. Jonathan hated his sense of impotence, of being involved in something over which he had no control. He was surly and uncooperative and treated the police with a sort of weary disdain. Walsh wanted nothing so much as to kick him up the backside, but after two hours of questioning he was satisfied there was nothing more he could get out of him. Jonathan had vindicated the three youngsters of the assault on Anne. According to him, they had changed into their nightclothes after the impromptu Lafite party, wrapped themselves in duvets and curled up in Jane's room to watch the late film on her television. The shattering glass, followed by McLoughlin's shouts for help, had startled them. No, they had heard nothing before that, but then the television had been quite loud. Walsh questioned Elizabeth. She was nervous but helpful. When asked for her movements on the previous evening, her account tallied exactly with Jonathan's, down to the most trivial detail. Jane, after a day's respite, gave a similar story. Unless they were in some fantastic and well-organised conspiracy, they had had nothing to do with the attempt on Anne's life.